Performance is a critical attribute of database systems. High performance database systems are vital for commercial success, especially for companies working on time-critical and sensitive data, such as healthcare and financial firms. Customer orders must be processed quickly, and inventory must be identified and assigned to a respective order. With systems getting bigger and databases becoming more complex every year, better database performance has become a prominent issue.
Database performance depends on a number of factors. The most important factors include computing hardware, applications, workload, and system/database parameters. Slight alteration of one parameter can have a significant effect on performance. For instance, increased memory capacity can be efficiently used to optimize performance. In addition, database performance parameters are typically interdependent, so that tuning one parameter modifies the value and/or effectiveness of others.
Certain existing techniques attempt to optimize database performance by tuning a subset of the database parameters. These techniques involve significant investment in both money and people. Moreover, present techniques do not employ efficient utilization of memory capacity available to database systems. It should be apparent that an inefficient database results in a large amount of input/output (I/O) activity and a high response time.